Why Israel Should Withdraw From the West Bank—Now

With peace process stalled and the Iranian threat looming, one controversial solution could help Jerusalem evade both problems.

An Israeli soldier stands guard at a checkpoint near the West Bank. (Reuters)

These generally
feel like good times in Israel. The existential dangers facing the country often
seem to have subsided, with sanctions starting to bite Iran and most Israelis,
secure behind their wall, able to ignore the Palestinians. Recent protests in Tel Aviv have focused on social security, not the physical
kind.

Yet the dangers posed by Iran and by Israel's occupation
of the West Bank have never been greater. Take Iran: while the chances of conflict
may seem to have diminished recently, there's reason to believe that the
chances of an Israeli strike are actually as high as ever. Jerusalem knows that
Washington opposes an Israeli attack on Iran's suspected nuclear program -- so the
best time to launch one would be now, before the U.S. election, when both parties
are still desperately courting the pro-Israel vote. A number of experts think an Israeli
strike wouldn't actually keep Tehran from building a bomb, at least not for
very long. But Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud
Barak say they disagree.

Then there's the occupation, now in its 45th
year. The peace process is dead, or at least in a coma, and the Obama
administration has dropped it, at least for now. Yet the costs for Israel keep
climbing. The Jewish state has never been more isolated; Turkey has grown
distant and with the Arab Spring, Jerusalem may have lost its cold but important
ally in Cairo. Inside the territories, Palestinians are growing less supportive of the peaceful president of the Palestinian Authority,
Mahmoud Abbas, whose administration is struggling with corruption and whose cooperation
with Israel has earned him little in return.

These two problems -- Iran and the occupation
-- can often seem like crises with no solutions. But there is one move Israel
could take that could immediately improve its security, rebuild its moral
standing, defuse tensions with the Palestinians, and deeply rattle Iran: start
to dismantle the occupation of the West Bank. Ideally, Israel would do so as
part of a negotiated peace, but it could also move unilaterally, if necessary.

Unilateral
withdrawal has a bad reputation in Israel. It is neither a perfect nor a
complete solution. But it's the best step Israel can take now, on its own, to
shore up its physical security and its status as a liberal, democratic, Jewish
state.

Consider the benefits Israel would reap
if it started reducing its footprint in the West Bank. First there would be the financial dividend. The direct costs of
running the occupation are thought to come to around $6.3
billion a year -- a significant sum and a big
savings Israel could reap if it no longer had to protect so many outlying outposts
in hostile territory.

Then there's the moral reward. Pulling out from all or most of the
West Bank settlements would free Israeli parents from having to send their sons
and daughters to enforce a brutal project that many of them oppose. It would weaken the power of Israeli extremists and ultranationalists
by depriving them of their power base in the Jewish settlements and undermining
their messianic dreams of a Greater Israel. And it would finally allow the
Jewish State to start shedding its international pariah status. It may be too
optimistic to hope that the country would recapture its pre-1967 glow -- when a
combination of sympathy for Israel's underdog status, admiration for the tiny
state's stunning successes, and European guilt about World War Two made Israel
a cause célèbre in Western capitals.

But even a partial
Israeli withdrawal would, at the very least, deprive Israel's enemies of their
biggest rhetorical weapon. At best, it would lessen or even end Israel's
isolation and open doors for trade, investment, and tourism in Europe and the
Middle East. It would also greatly strengthen Israel's position on Iran by
giving its Arab neighbors more room to openly support Jerusalem against Tehran.

On a recent trip to Saudi Arabia, I was struck by something officials
kept repeating (albeit always off the record): that their leaders would love
nothing better than to cozy up to Israel on security matters. I've heard the same thing in the Gulf emirates and Jordan as well.

This sentiment, implausible
as it sounds, is not being driven by some mysterious new wave of brotherly love
in the Levant. It is based on something much more primal and powerful than
that: fear. The one country that scares most Sunni leaders more than Israel
is Iran. Yet they also know that Israel happens to be the only country in the
region strong enough to stand up to the Islamic Republic. What's keeping these
emirs from joining forces with Israel against Iran is the opposition of their
own publics, opposition that is based overwhelming on Israel's oppression of
the Palestinians. Were Israel to end that oppression, the popular opposition might
well soften, freeing up Sunni Arab leaders to at least quietly join forces with
Jerusalem against Tehran.

So if the benefits
of ending the occupation are so powerful, why hasn't Israel started doing it already?
The answer one hears most frequently is that time is not ripe, that Israel has
no Palestinian partner for peace. There's something to this: despite pledges of
reconciliation, Palestinian rule is divided between Hamas, which is still sworn
to Israel's destruction, and the Palestinian Liberation Organization, which is too
weak and corrupt.

This is a real
problem. Yet Israel doesn't need to
wait for the Palestinians to make progress on the occupation. While it would be
preferable for the two to strike a deal before either took action, Jerusalem retains
the ability to act on its own.

In the seven years since the Israelis withdrew from Gaza, the idea
of unilateralism has become highly unpopular in Israel. But it's suddenly being
talked
about again, and a variety of Israelis -- from Barak to a new
peace movement drawn from the security establishment, called the Blue and White
Coalition -- have begun pushing for it. This discussion stems in part from Israelis'
frustration with the deadlocked peace process. But there are several other key
facts that make unilateralism a plausible alternative.

There are currently about 500,000 Jewish settlers living in the West Bank. It's unlikely that any
Israeli leader would have the political capital to pull all of them out, short
of a comprehensive deal. But Israel could still make great progress in the
meantime, because about 375,000 of those half million settlers live in
settlement blocs that either straddle the Israeli border or are located just a
few kilometers away. These settlement towns function, in a sense, as suburbs of
Jerusalem and greater Tel Aviv. They are already practically part of Israel
proper -- something even the Palestinian Authority effectively acknowledged when
it provisionally agreed, as part of a final deal that was never sealed, to cede
most of these blocs to Israel in return for swaps of territory elsewhere. What's
remarkable is how little land these blocs actually represent. Trading just
about five percent of Palestinian territory for five percent of Israeli land would
bring some 85 percent of all Jewish settlers in the West Bank into Israel
proper.

Other settlers could be induced
to move. According to a survey conducted by Peace Now in 2002
(the last year for which data is available), some 77 percent of West Bank
settlers are non-ideological -- that is, they chose the West Bank for economic,
not political or religious reasons (many members of this group are recent
immigrants from Russia who couldn't afford homes in Israel proper). Settlers
enjoy generous government benefits, including higher wages for some state jobs
and large subsidies for education, transportation, mortgages, and land
purchases. Those who take advantage of these handouts are generally secular or
ultra-orthodox, but not necessarily ultra-nationalist. That may explain why, according
to a poll taken last year, at least 100,000 Israeli settlers say they would be
willing to move back within the pre-1967 borders today if they were offered enough
financial assistance.

All of this suggests that the vast majority of Israeli settlers
could be peacefully returned to Israel, either by incorporating slivers of land
along the Green Line into Israel proper or by offering them economic
inducements to move. This wouldn't be easy or uncontroversial in Israel, much
less in the West Bank. But the point is that it's doable -- and a step Israel could
take on its own.

Such moves could be taken without repeating the mistakes of Lebanon, which
the Israelis fled chaotically in 2000, or of Gaza, the withdrawal from which was
presented to the Palestinians as an end in and of itself and as an alternative
to negotiations, not a prelude to them.

To be sure, there would be some
obvious problems for any unilateral withdrawal plan. For one thing, it would be
a partial fix; for another, you can't swap land (or anything else) singlehandedly.
Some Israelis fear that, by giving the Palestinians something for nothing, it might
leave them with little motivation to start talking peace again. Israel could leave the army behind in
strategic locations in the Jordan Valley and the Judean heights, both to
safeguard Israel's security and give the two sides reason to keep talking. As
for the land-swaps, Israel could start acting on its own as if the two sides had agreed to a swap: by freezing new
settlement construction while starting to integrate many of the
Jewish-populated slivers of land along its borders into Israel proper (without
annexing them outright, since that might look like a land-grab) while preparing
the territory it plans to hand over by demarcating the ground and clearing it
of any structures.

Despite such measures, unilateralism still
wouldn't be a perfect solution. It may induce the Palestinians to start talking
peace, but it may not. Yet even if the Palestinians simply pocket
Israel's overtures or worse respond with violence, Israel would still be better
off than today, since it would have dramatically reduced its exposed and
vulnerable outposts in the West Bank.

So what are the odds that Netanyahu is
going to do any of this? No one but the prime minister knows
for sure, and he's given no public indications. What we do know, however, is
that Defense Minister Ehud Barak, the second most powerful person in the
government, seems to support
such a plan. So, it seems likely, would Kadima, the
opposition party that controls more seats in the Knesset than any other and
that recently bolted from Netanyahu's coalition but is generally supportive of
the peace process. The death of Bibi's very influential and very hardline father
in April ago could also give him more leeway.

Here the West -- and particularly the United States, whether it is
led by Barack Obama or Mitt Romney -- can help. Israelis often give their
American supporters the sense that they're very interested in receiving
economic support (official aid from Washington is expected to hit just over $3 billion this year plus many millions more in
private giving), but are much less enthusiastic about unsolicited advice. But
that doesn't mean the West should just pay up and shut up. Sometimes being
friends means speaking truth to power -- and pushing partners to act in their
own interests, even if they don't want to.

Jonathan Tepperman is the managing editor of Foreign Affairs. He was previously managing editor and a director at Eurasia Group, a global political risk consulting firm, deputy editor of Newsweek International, and deputy managing editor at Foreign Affairs.
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Jonathan Tepperman is the managing editor of Foreign Affairs. He has spent his career covering foreign policy and international news, both as a writer and an editor. He was previously managing editor and a director at Eurasia Group, a global political risk consulting firm. Before joining Eurasia Group, Tepperman spent three years at Newsweek, where he was the deputy editor of Newsweek International. In that post he helped oversee Newsweek's Asia, Europe, Middle East, and Africa coverage, top-edited the InternationaList section, ran the annual Davos Ideas issue, and wrote a regular style and luxury column, "The Good Life." Prior to that, he spent eight years at Foreign Affairs magazine, rising to the post of deputy managing editor.

Tepperman has written for a range of publications, including Newsweek and Foreign Affairs, as well as The New York Times (magazine, op-ed page, and book review), The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The International Herald Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, The Christian Science Monitor, The New Republic, and others.

He has a BA in English literature from Yale University and law degrees from Oxford and NYU. Tepperman lives in Manhattan.